Eighth Step

The Eighth Step follows Vincent, an ancient vampire living anonymously in Hollywood - walking the streets, riding the bus, feeding only at night on the blood of the city's lost and forgotten. He has survived for centuries by staying invisible, preying on those who won't be missed. But Vincent has a problem: the people of Hollywood are saturated in drugs, and he's absorbing every substance through the blood he drinks. His teeth are deteriorating, his sleep is gone, and his carefully maintained existence is unraveling.

Desperate, Vincent finds himself at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in a converted church on a Friday night, clutching a copy of the Twelve Steps. He works his way through them with dark, wry pragmatism - skipping God entirely, accepting Step One, laughing at Step Four - until he hits Step Eight: We made a list of all the people we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. For a vampire who has fed on humanity for hundreds of years, the list would be endless.

Set against the neon-lit chaos of the Sunset Strip - gunfights in parking lots, overdoses in rat suits, the full pageant of Hollywood at midnight - Vincent navigates his centuries-old existence with intelligence, dark humor, and a stubborn moral code. He never litters. He feeds only on those the world has already discarded. He is, in his own way, trying.

Then he meets Jennifer. For the first time in hundreds of years, something shifts. His fangs recede. His reflection appears in the mirror. Love, it seems, may be the one thing that can cure what no twelve-step program can. But Hollywood is indifferent to miracles - and what the city gives, it takes back fast.

The Eighth Step is a darkly comic, deeply human vampire novel about addiction, loneliness, survival, and the impossible arithmetic of making amends for a life lived at everyone else's expense.